Calling for both Democrats and Republicans to “join forces again to confront an urgent national crisis,” Trump reminded the assembled lawmakers of an impending spending bill deadline. The government could shut down again on February 15, when the temporary deal that ended the previous government shutdown expires, if Trump and Congress can’t reach an agreement on his demands for border security and a wall.

With this sense of urgency in mind, Teen Vogue spoke with Voto Latino president María Teresa Kumar about the rhetoric of Tuesday night’s speech. She made the case that if immigration is a moral issue, the Trump administration is failing that imperative.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the immigration issues Trump addressed and how Kumar responded to each.

Caravans

“As we speak, large, organized caravans are on the march to the United States,” Trump said.

Teen Vogue has reported from migrant caravans making their way through Mexico, speaking with young people and mothers fleeing violence in their countries of origin.

“From what we're understanding is that they are, disproportionately, the individuals coming from Guatemala and from Honduras. They are not even native Spanish speakers,” Kumar explains of the migrants in the caravans, many of whom speak Indigenous languages. “They are fleeing increasingly deadly violence in their communities, and so they are doing the best they can by making their way to the U.S.,” she says.

Kumar points to the 2014 border crisis, when tens of thousands showed up at the southern border, many of them unaccompanied children from Central America. In response, then president Barack Obama set up a special system for parents in the U.S. to apply for refugee status for their children in Central America, an effort to discourage the kids from making the dangerous trek north.

“President Obama had to have conversations on how do you make sure that people don't make the treacherous journeys,” Kumar explains as she discusses the importance and impact of the asylum program, noting that the Trump administration abolished it in 2017. “When [Trump] says that he's concerned for the lives of children making the trajectory, he's directly responsible.”

Morality

“This is a moral issue,” Trump declared of immigration. “We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.”

“No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America's political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards. Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal immigration,” he said, adding, “Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate — it is actually very cruel.”

Kumar disagrees. “The moral imperative lies for us to be decent and fair,” she says. “He tried to conflate that the people on the border right now are trying to cross without rights, and in fact, from full-extent reporting, they are asylum seekers. And as asylum seekers, by international law that our government crafted, they can legally seek asylum. And he's trying to obfuscate that with trying to basically clump immigration as one big clump.”

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Notably, Trump’s speech contained no reference to asylum, the legal practice that allows people to ask for entry into the U.S. if they face violence or discrimination at home.

“This is not the very first time that we've ever had asylum seekers,” Kumar explains. She notes that asylum denial rates have actually been climbing under Trump’s administration, as documented by researchers at Syracuse University.

Moreover, Kumar notes, the Trump administration has demonstrated moral failure in its family-separation policies: “It is awful, again, to scare people under this guise that he actually cares about human condition, where every principle of his administration has pointed completely to the opposite,” she says, specifically referencing family separation. “That all negates what he was trying to prove last night.”

Public Safety Threats

In his speech, Trump once again referenced the gang MS-13, the notion that Americans are being murdered by immigrants, and instances of sex trafficking. While many migrants are actually fleeing MS-13 gang violence in Central America, Trump instead focused on their alleged infiltration through the southern border. Kumar sees this as an attempt to influence his constituents with scare tactics.

“He's trying to scare Americans into, I think, in some ways, even denying our own identity,” she says. She says that instead of focusing on the 11 million undocumented people already in the country or the asylum seekers at the border, “he decides instead to try to perpetuate [the notion] that he actually seems to care.”

“That is false because he has demonstrated the litany of lies, even saying that El Paso was one of the most dangerous cities in the country,” Kumar continues, referencing a passage in Trump’s SOTU speech when he said El Paso, Texas, had “one of the highest [crime rates] in the entire country” and was “considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities.” Trump is set to hold his first campaign rally of the year in El Paso, according to Time.

According to the El Paso Times, the border town’s violent crime rate was actually at a 20-year low in 2006 before the border fence was constructed at the order of then president George W. Bush. Construction on the fence began in 2008 and was completed in 2011; during that time, the El Paso Times reports, the violent crime rate actually went up by 17%.

“It's always been a city that has enjoyed a community that crosses the border and goes back to work and that thrives on this interaction,” Kumar says. “Instead, he tries to hoodwink the American people by painting with broad strokes, a whole community as being scary”

The Wall

Kumar is dubious about the prospect of a wall actually working, noting that tactics like tunnels — many of which are still being discovered, according to The Washington Post — make them easy to circumvent.

“I think that our country has always been identified as a beacon of hope for immigrants with big ideas,” she says. “And while the Statue of Liberty [represents] ‘Welcome your masses so that we can continue to contribute and renew our country,’ Trump and his wall is the antithesis of that.”

Others view the wall itself as a moral failure. In an op-ed for Teen Vogue published in 2017, Jillian Hernandez, Alan Aja, and Raúl Carrillo wrote, “Opposing the wall because it’s expensive, not because it's wrong, also obscures the balance of who truly ‘owns’ and who truly ‘owes.'”

Abolishing ICE

“We will always support the brave men and women of law enforcement — and I pledge to you tonight that we will never abolish our heroes from ICE,” Trump said before explaining that “more law enforcement” was part of his policy agenda at the border.

Kumar isn’t so sure the ICE debate is settled.

“I think we have to have a real honest debate,” she says of ICE funding, noting that even veteran ICE agents are struggling with ICE’s tactics under Trump. “This idea right now that we are giving more money to an agency that cannot keep track of children, that is fast and furiously racially profiling individuals, that have U.S. citizens, in some cases, in custody and accidentally tried to deport them, it's clear that that agency is broken, and there is zero oversight.”

Kumar said she believes officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement, should be “brought forth to a public oversight hearing” for what she called “gross violations of human rights, of children’s rights.”